There is new video (a CNN feed from 10 Connects) from last week’s shoving and shouting match at the door to a town hall on health care reform featuring Congresswoman Kathy Castor in Ybor City. (h/t to Pushing Rope)
By Manny Leto
PoHo contributor and editor, Cigar City Magazine
You may not have even known it was happening, but “Rapprochement With Cuba: Good For Tampa Bay, Good For Florida, Good For America,” a conference sponsored by the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation and held Saturday at the Italian Club in Ybor City, was, by its very existence, a milestone in repairing the tattered relationship between Tampa and Cuba.
About 150 guests, panelists, professors and local politicians filled the grand, neo-classical Italian Club, once the social, cultural and political epicenter of Tampa’s Italian community. Whether the speeches, panel discussions, and networking sessions will really accomplish much toward ending the 50-year-old U.S. embargo, no one is really sure. However, to get a sense of where the Cuba barometer is pointing, you could start with the venue itself.
In 1955, a young, verbose Fidel Castro arrived in Ybor City. This was no accident, no anomaly. In fact, it made perfect sense. Castro, in a bid to gain popular support for his uprising against CIA-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, he followed — literally — in the footsteps of an earlier young, charismatic Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo: Amber Rhea/flickr.com
By Manny Leto
PoHo contributor
Most Tampa folks believe there are tunnels under the streets of Ybor City. People say they criss-cross 7th Avenue and were used by bootleggers in the 1920s to smuggle booze between establishments or stash cash in hidden vaults. Sounds sexy. I’m not sure whether it’s true. I met someone once whose family owned a grocery store on 7th. Apparently, she played in the tunnel under the family store when she was a little girl.
Maybe. After last week the only thing I know for sure is hidden under the asphalt in Ybor City is Augusta Brick.
Architect sketch of the new HCC Student Services Building
By Manny Leto
PoHo contributor
It’s 8 a.m in Ybor City, and there’s not a construction worker in sight at Hillsborough Community College’s new Student Services building on Palm Avenue. Pillars for the fourth floor reach skyward, while exposed rebar twists in the wind.
For weeks now, a group of influential Ybor City property owners, the Barrio Latino Commission, the city’s Office of Historic Preservation and the Cuban Club has battled HCC over the design of it’s new Student Services Building which by anyone’s standing is clearly out of place along the brick streets of Old Ybor.
There’s a reason why the architecture of HCC’s Ybor Campus, including the design for the new Student Services building, has never really jibed with what the Barrio Latino Commission considers the “historic patterns” of Tampa’s National Historic Landmark District: It doesn’t have to.
At least, that’s what college officials say.
How bad are things at Centro Ybor, the entertainment and restaurant destination in Ybor City (that, disclosure time, I once did PR for)?
Even the Starbucks there is looking at shutting its doors. As part of a nationwide closure of the ubiquitous coffee shops, the coffee monster wants to shutter the Centro store, but the neighborhood association is not taking this lying down, according to TBO.com:
It isn’t a full-fledged protest yet, but an Ybor City neighborhood association has launched a modest campaign to persuade Starbucks to stay at Centro Ybor.
The Historic Ybor Neighborhood Civic Association is encouraging Starbucks fans to call the Seattle-based corporation and urge it to stay put at the Ybor City entertainment center. Starbucks revealed earlier this month it plans to leave Centro Ybor, but hasn’t given a time or date.
From ABC Action News:
Home furnishings made in Sweden will soon find its way into Tampa Bay homes with the opening of IKEA’s 3rd Florida store. May 6th, 2009 is the target for the official opening of the store that lets the consumer assemble many of the products at reduced prices.
Store officials claim in addition to the 400 to be hired to work for IKEA, nearly 500 construction jobs were created while the store was being built along Adamo Drive and 22nd Street.
Future store manager Monica Varela is excited about the progress, ” We are thrilled at the excellent construction progress made in the summer and fall….”
It’s November 6, 2008 in Hillsborough: Do you know who your county commissioner is?
No, you don’t. And that’s exactly what Kevin Beckner’s campaign manager, Mitch Kates, predicted. He’s currently slightly ahead of incumbent Brian Blair, who has yet to concede as early votes are still being counted.
Check out Kates’ prescient concerns from this video, shot at 10:30 p.m. on Election Night at Gaspar’s Grotto in Ybor City:
Ralph Nader brings his Ecology Party ticket presidential campaign to Tampa’s Cuban Club, 2010 N. 14th St., on Tuesday, Oct. 28.
Nader will hold a rally at 6:30 p.m. at the Ybor City location. Suggested contributions for the rally are $10, with students suggested to give $5.
Info at (804) 678-9203 or events@votenader.org.
Taking the meters off Ybor’s streets might improve its foot traffic, shown pitifully here during a recent afternoon (photo credit: Wayne Garcia)
This just in from Mayor Pam Iorio:
The City of Tampa has been working with the Ybor Chamber, the Ybor City Development Corporation, residents and members of the Ybor business community regarding many of the parking concerns in Ybor City. Yesterday, I met with staff and asked that they begin work to remove the on-street parking meters in Ybor. The meters will be transitioned to two-hour parking spaces.
It is my hope that the removal of the on-street parking meters will encourage more people to visit Ybor City.
Employee parking in the two-hour spaces will continue to be prohibited. The removal of the meters will require city staff to work with the business district to ensure there is an understanding of these parking policies.
The City’s parking system is funded entirely through user fees. It is anticipated that some amount of tax increment financing revenue collected from Ybor City will go toward reimbursing the Parking Fund for lost revenue. Additionally, there may be a personnel savings through the reduced need for enforcement. Therefore, while the possible revenue loss to the Parking Fund is estimated at $200,000, the amount will likely be far less given these two factors.
The new parking plan for Ybor is expected to take effect within the next few months. Until the meters have been removed, all current parking policies will remain in effect. New signage will replace the meters that will indicate the two-hour parking limitations and the prohibition of employee parking.
The last time we discussed Ybor’s draconian parking meter enforcement, the comment line lit up.
Right off the bat, let’s get the disclosure out of the way: as a political consultant in the late ’90s through about 2002, I represented the original developers of Centro Ybor. I remember vividly the big PR launch we did, with Ferdie Pacheco 
and then-Mayor Dick Greco in the old ballroom of the Centro building, a magnificent space with great history. We had to pipe in air conditioning from huge portable units to make the event possible in summer. The center had great promise. (Yes, taxpayer-subsidized promise.)
So it is with great sadness to see the passing of another of the original restuarants in Centro Ybor, the one that landed that beautiful ballroom space, Big City Tavern. It was a smart and classy place, steeped in history and floor to ceiling windows. Sure, it wasn’t a perfect restaurant, but it was a great addition to this area. Now, it’s gone, as Flashpoint reports:
Three days after shutting down his dream, Brian Cornacchia sounded tired, but upbeat- like a boxer who lost the fight but gave it his best shot. Cornacchia praises his staff. He says his landlord, M & J Wilcow couldn’t have been more supportive. He claims his bar and catering business were very successful. If there was a medical examiner’s report to identify the cause of death, it might read:  Financial asphyxiation due to repeated news accounts of beatings, stabbings, and shootings in Ybor City.
Cornacchia believes the negative associations people make with Ybor City were his undoing. “‘Dirty, dangerous, tattoos, kids.’ Those are the words people think of when you say, Ybor City. It’s never ’classy, historic, artistic.’” I asked him if that was just perception or reality. He believes the problems are real and complained that when people dine at Sideberns in South Tampa, they’ve got lots of places to go and things to do after dinner. His clientele, he says,  just isn’t interested in the loud and sometimes rowdy clubs and street scene.
One of the original problems in Ybor after the Centro project was built, I think in retrospect, was the attempt to quickly Disney-ize the historic district to make it appeal to tourists and well-heeled folks. Lots of the things that made Ybor great — its eclectic population, its collection of artists and creatives who could only afford lower rents — seemed driven out. The huge late-night crowds were knocked down from the tens of thousands who used to come to relative handfuls today. It seems to have left Ybor not crowded enough to be safe, the destination (largely) for locals who seek trouble. And the killings and muggings continued and seemed to increase.
Today, Ybor City is left to its own devices to find some kind of equilibrium between the type of people who want to eat at good restaurants and the “tattooed” crowd referred to above who want to club and party into the late night hours. Who knows if Ybor will reconcile its two sides, although it seems there is plenty of room for both if certain things could occur. First and foremost, wet zone the entire historic district and let folks wander from restaurant to bar to restaurant with a drink in their hands. Second, find a way to streamline the development process, especially in front of the historic-minded Architecture Review Commission. It’s one thing to preserve our past, but if there is not an economical way to reuse those historical buildings, they simply rot and decay and give nothing back to that neighborhood. Third, the city must immediately remove all the parking meters from the district and encourage people to come back for lunch and dinner. La Gaceta publisher Patrick Manteiga has railed for years about the bad impression that the parking enforcers give to the historic district, and he’s right.
Ybor City is worth saving. Again.
(Photo credit: Kathleen Conklin / Some Rights Reserved)
